RTE: The battle for our news

A new book charts the fascinating history of the struggle for control of RTÉ's current affairs output and the station's attempts to maintain independence from governments and the church. By Conor Brady

Few activities are more absorbing or moving than walking an ancient battlefield. Here, men fought or tended their wounds, or generals pitched their field headquarters or placed their heavy armaments. The courage, the brilliance, the energy – and the questionable relevance now of so much sacrifice – come flooding clear.

One has a similar sense reading John Horgan's excellent RTÉ News and Current Affairs 1926-1997, the most recent volume in the Broadcasting and Public Life series, edited by Richard Pine (Four Courts Press).

It narrates decades of struggle between programme-makers, bureaucrats, politicians, churchmen and others for control of the broadcasting activities of a small, enclosed society called Ireland. It recounts deeds of bravery, of subversion, of patient determination, of dissent, of intimidation.

It is almost wholly irrelevant now. Most of these struggles were fought when the Irish radio service was still the adolescent offspring of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs and when television was an eight hours-a-day, single channel service.

The momentous confrontations between broadcasters and government took place in an Ireland in which virtually the entire viewing adult population tuned in as one to watch The Late Late Show, or Hall's Pictorial Weekly.

Digital technology and the advent of the internet have rendered these struggles largely meaningless in contemporary terms. To silence, divert or influence the content of RTÉ's news or current affairs output, even until the 1990s, represented a hugely significant strategic prize.

Today, it is about as relevant as securing the Heights of Balaclava or the Bridge at Arnhem.

Nonetheless, RTÉ News and Current Affairs 1926-1997 is a fascinating tale for anyone interested into the power-play between media and politicians or between media and the broader establishment.

It starts with the early, tentative days when radio news consisted of a series of bulletins, read by 2RN's "Station Announcer", at 10.30 each evening.

It describes the development of news and current affairs, right up to the appointment of Bob Collins as director-general in 1997. Importantly, it also reaches forward in time, to note a significant organisational change during Collins's tenure: the bringing together of news and current affairs resources at RTÉ into an expanded news division.

Some sense of the climate in which the national broadcaster – indeed all the media – had to operate in the early decades of the State may be had from the words of Eamon de Valera, commenting in 1937 on the 'free speech' provisions of his soon-to-be-enacted Constitution.

"The right of citizens to express freely their opinion and convictions, cannot in fact, be permitted in any state. Are we going to have anarchical principles, for example, propagated here? I say no... you would not give to the proponents of what is wrong and unnatural the same liberty as would be accorded to the proponents of what is right."

Eamon de Valera had little cause to worry about 2RN or, later, Raidio Éireann, taking up principles that were either unnatural or anarchical. It was when the Irish television service – Telefis Éireann – got up and running in 1961, that the most bitter tensions began to emerge, not merely between broadcasters and the politicians, but also between broadcasters and the powerful church authorities, notably the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid.

Horgan quotes a thundering letter of 1963, from McQuaid to the Director General, Kevin McCourt, after the TV programme Newsview interviewed Fr Gregory Baum, a Canadian priest of strongly ecumenical views.

The Archbishop wished to know "by whose authority the stranger-priest, the Rev Gregory Baum, was invited to speak and did speak, in my diocese on matters of faith and morals?"

From the 1960s, Professor Horgan takes us through the great upheavals and issues: the brief, glorious challenge led by Lelia Doolan and Jack Dowling; the Seven Days investigation into Dublin money-lending and the subsequent tribunal of inquiry; the eruption of the North; the proscriptions under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act; the emergence of "The Stickies"; the sacking of the RTÉ Authority and finally the relaxing of the Section 31 provisions as part of the Northern Ireland peace process.

What makes this narrative uniquely valuable – and the writer acknowledges it in his introduction – is the fact that RTÉ made available for the first time the minutes of its editorial committees.

It is thus possible to gain important insights into the minds of successive directors-general, Authority members and programme-makers, as well as politicians and civil servants acting on their behalf.

There is much casuistry, much caution, much deft seeking after compromise. One is struck time and again by the centrality of the North or the "national question" – call it what you will – in the recurring crises.

I put in two spells working at RTÉ; a year in radio and about nine months working with a certain Mary McAleese, on a TV programme called Europa.

I recall being struck always by the sensitivity of colleagues to the influence of the political establishment. If a minister were on the premises at Montrose, one almost felt it. If it were known that the Taoiseach was due, people practically stood to attention.

It is perhaps because modern media technology has broken RTÉ's broadcast monopoly that it has now become liberated. The fear is largely gone.

The news division under Ed Mulhall has found new courage and its purpose. It has discovered how to initiate investigations. It has learned the importance of being able to place its correspondents at the scene of important world news developments.

Nowadays, Irish broadcasters have little to fear from their traditional detractors. The threats to serious media standards today are less easily identified.

But they are the more insidious for that. They are called Deregulation, Market-forces and Globalisation. Bishops and Government ministers were pushovers by comparison.

Conor Brady is Editor Emeritus of The Irish Times. He is a senior teaching fellow at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business at UCD